On Collective Imagination, Joe Salvo declares the Information Age is done for, writing: “a period of history can be characterized by the dominant technology that separates the leaders from the followers.” He believes humanity has approached a tipping point where the separation between leaders and followers will cease to exist, as the internet democratizes the planet and good information becomes ubiquitous. So what’s up next? Salvo calls it a “Systems Age,” which involves “sensing, collecting, and manipulating data in near real-time with little to no human supervision.” Sounds like a lot of fun! For an artificial intelligence.

On Applied Statistics, Aleks Jakulin considers the importance of privacy but also the potential windfalls of sharing medical data, saying it would “allow massive advances in medicine.” And on A Blog Around The Clock, Coturnix (aka Bora Zivkovic) explores the ways our nascent age of interconnectedness affects book publishing, as the internet offers writers more ways to start writing, get noticed, self-publish and embrace new forms.